An amendment written by Sen. Ted Cruz could be the thing that gets a Republican health care plan passed by the House and Senate. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

(Newser)
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Ted Cruz could be the one to push an ObamaCare repeal and replacement through the House and Senate, the Hill reports. A GOP aide says the Congressional Budget Office is looking at two versions of the Better Care Reconciliation Act—one of which contains an amendment by Cruz that is getting support from moderate and conservative Republicans in the House and Senate. The Cruz amendment would allow insurance providers to sell any kind of policies they wanted—as long as they also sold at least one policy that complies with ACA requirements. Those requirements include covering maternity care and mental healthcare and not charging sick people more for insurance.

Under the Cruz amendment, Americans without health risks could buy cheaper, non-comprehensive plans, while Americans with health problems could buy the more expensive, ACA-compliant plans, the New York Times reports. Government subsidies for those ACA-compliant plans would be available to people making less than $42,000 or so per year. Conservative Republicans like the plan because "it gives everybody some options," while moderates like that it semi-preserves protections for pre-existing conditions. But experts warn such segmenting leads to expensive and volatile insurance markets. Meanwhile, as his amendment is being considered, Cruz was nearly shouted down during a Fourth of July speech by protesters upset with his healthcare efforts, the Texas Tribune reports.

Robert, I and my wife are 56. Why are we paying for maternity care, birth control, and contraception we would never use? Believe it or not, before Obamacare, you could get personalized insurance and the world survived.

Grumpy Guy

Jul 7, 2017 10:34 AM CDT

Leftists don't need Health Care, they need helicopter rides.

Robert

Jul 7, 2017 9:29 AM CDT

Ted Cruz's healthcare idea solves NOTHING. And betrays a complete misunderstanding of how insurance works. IN THE FIRST PLACE: the idea would only make sense if lower PREMIUMS always guaranteed lower healthcare COSTS for those who buy healthcare insurance. But pre-ACA history shows they don't. If this plan is put in practice, COVERAGE on the cheaper policies will be reduced much more dramatically than PREMIUMS. So the value of the cheaper policies will decline significantly and buyers will actually be exposed to much greater COSTS. What's worse: because of the complexity of insurance language, buyers won't understand this until they try to collect claims. So in practice the cheaper policies will be more like a FRAUD than a SOLUTION. If you give buyers the 'freedom' to unknowingly buy deficient policies, you can only logically end-up at one of two outcomes: (A) people dying from lack of healthcare services they can't afford; or (B) society as a whole forced to step in on the back-end to absorb the cost of those services. And we all know (or should) that the worst/most-expensive way to finance anything is on the back-end, after-the-fact. SECONDLY: if only people with significant current health problems buy comprehensive insurance, it will be unable to offer any value to those people. Insurance only works by essentially averaging the cost of claims suffered by a group across that group. To make it very simple: if everyone's car was stolen every year, your car-theft insurance premium could not be less than the cost of a car -- PLUS an add-on to pay the insurance company's operating costs and profit.